On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Timothy Arceri <T.Arceri@bom.gov.au> wrote:
Hi Tobias,
I meant to respond to your suggestion to use a different letter for half hour daylight savings earlier but real work got in the way.
I appreciate what you are trying to do in trying to create a standard for abbreviations. However I fear this is out of the scope of what we are trying to achieve right now.
You are confusing something. My proposal to use internationalized time point unique abbreviations ( http://anna.info/wiki/Internationalized_time_point_unique_time_zone_abbrevia... ) is not the precedence in the IANA time zone database that I gave as evidence against your application of the letter D.
I do generally agree with the statement ' the TZ Coordinator SHALL NOT set time zone policy for a region but use judgment and whatever available sources exist to assess what the average person on street would think the time actually is ' Apart from the fact that the TZ Coordinator is setting time zone policy against what is observed (Siberia, Bouvet Island with wrong offsets), the discussion here is about abbreviations. If you think that abbreviations are covered by the above statement, then look at FET (Europe), WIT (Indonesia) where the TZ Coordinator invented completely new abbreviations.
In other words we should not be inventing a new abbreviation for Lord Howe Island. LHDT is new to the database and the use of D for 0:30 has no precedence. To the contrary, HD and HS are used for Half Daylight and Half Summer, as DD and DS are used for Double Daylight and Double Summer (2:00).
there is precedence for avoiding "D" if the offset change during DST is different from 60 min.
This is a little confusing as the Cook Islands data entry is in amongst the Australian islands but it is not an Australian territory so this precedence does not apply to the Australian abbreviations. I didn't claim it to be Australian territory. Is there anywhere any evidence that D is used /in the database as offset marker/ for anything else than 60 min?
An updated table about letter usage within the abbreviations can be found at; http://anna.info/wiki/IANA_time_zone_database#Abbreviations -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/